Daimler denies Focus Magazin’s report on 2013 internal sales targets

Daimler AG, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, has denied a report from German weekly magazine Focus which claimed to publish internal sales targets for the luxury brand.

The magazine said on Friday that the division aimed to increase sales by 6.9 percent to 1.55 million vehicles this year. The report citing internal targets also said sales of Mercedes-Benz and Smart cars in China should rise roughly 30 percent to 274,000 vehicles a year. “None of the figures correspond to our internal plan targets,” a Daimler spokeswoman told Reuters, without giving details of the internal targets for 2013.

In 2012, Daimler sold 1.45 million vehicles globally. In China, the company sold 212,000 vehicles, of which 196,211 were Mercedes-Benz vehicles and about 16,000 were Smart vehicles. Mercedes’ rivals BMW and Audi had much better sales in the world’s largest market: 326,444 and 405,838 vehicles respectively.

Daimler AG is sticking to its previously-released Mercedes-Benz brand sales plan, which calls for growth in 2013, of 1.5 million Mercedes-Benz vehicle sales in 2014 and 1.6 million Mercedes-Benz vehicles sales in 2015, the spokeswoman added.

The carmaker also denied the magazine’s detailed breakdown of its A-Class model sales, which would include 180,000 sales globally and 71,000 sales in Germany in 2013.